– Our old friend Aaron Bady from zunguzungu is getting a blog at the revamped New Inquiry as one of five new bloggers being brought on board – he kicks it off with an amazing 5,000 word review of David Graeber’s Debt. Recommend reading, whether or not you’ve planned on reading Debt, and make sure to follow him at his new digs.

– The New Inquiry pays their bloggers, and thus they depend on support from readers. They have a $2/month magazine you can subscribe to here, which will recap their best content from the month. I’m excited to see how that model works in practice; I miss so much online I’m surprised more blogs that put through a lot of content don’t do a “best of the month” edition.

(Psychology and behavioral people – why am I so willing to pay $2 a month for a magazine when I wouldn’t pay $24/year at the beginning of the year? Is the month-to-month-ness a hedge against a crappy magazine? If so, why don’t regular magazines sell month-to-month subscriptions – can they not handle volatility in the print numbers, or are they dependent on high new-stand prices and discounting that for yearly subscribers? Can that business model change?)

–30 More Years of Hell is Connor Kilpatrick’s opus to the generational war over at Jacobin, and it’s about how the boomers seem dead-set on waging generational war against the young. “Fittingly, the Tea Partiers have chosen the Ryan Budget as their very own spiritual lodestar–the Port Huron Statement of the old, white and reactionary” – lots of great phrases in there. It’s already been assigned in a classroom.

– Raise the Crime Rate from n+1 is one of the best pieces on mass incarceration I’ve read in a while; challenging and provocative the whole way through. “Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon— that is, one of total surveillance—America’s prisons are its blind spots, places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen.” It ends with an interesting discussion that moves away from the idea that there will be a “free lunch” solution to mass incarceration and instead calls for liberals to think through if they’d be comfortable with the death penalty and open-carry if it reduced prison sentences.

– Emily Crockett writes about being at the front lines of the policy violence at Occupy DC.

One Response to Random Links, February 8th 2012

” It ends with an interesting discussion that moves away from the idea that there will be a “free lunch” solution to mass incarceration and instead calls for liberals to think through if they’d be comfortable with the death penalty and open-carry if it reduced prison sentences.”

oh wow, you mean another kneejerk anti-“CW” article that swallows right wing tropes hook, line, and sinker and then pretends to be “pragmatic” about it?

I am so there.

And I’m quite sure he/she will be getting a gig with politico in 3…2..